Weekly Tips

The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden has created a three-and-a-half-acre garden where veggies are in the spotlight. Eight years in planning and creation, A Tasteful Place opened in October 2017. Complete with a lagoon and a view of the downtown Dallas skyline, the edibles garden welcomes visitors into delightful displays of fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers. A Tasteful Place’s mission is to expose guests to the ideas and practices of growing and eating sustainable, fresh, locally grown food.

Niki Jabbour is Horticulture’s resident expert on how to grow a better vegetable garden year-round. Here are some tips on how to get your vegetable garden ready now for planting and growing season. You need to dig, harvest, sow, clean and plant.

It’s something most people feel more than they know—that is, how plants help us. You’re in a beautiful park—shade trees, flowers, people enjoying themselves. You’re feeling uplifted, relaxed, smiling at others, maybe even willing to pick up a piece of trash or fetch an overthrown ball for some kids. Without necessarily knowing why you feel good.

words and photo by Melinda Myers Dress up your salads, sandwiches and snacks by growing microgreens. These mini sprouts are easy to grow, ready to harvest in less than two weeks and require no special growing equipment.

Even if you’re not a certified landscape designer, you can think like one and create gorgeous outdoor spaces that grow more successfully. Follow these key steps to greater success: Start with a clear idea or goal, build a workable budget, do your research, and plan ahead.

One thing that holds some people back from keeping houseplants or gardening in containers is the idea that the plants will need relatively frequent repotting and therefore be a bit high maintenance. Happily, there are some plants that like to …

A gardening friend asked: Do I really need grow lights to start seeds indoors or is the sunlight from a western-facing window enough? He was on a budget and wondered if the cost of an indoor system was worth the investment. Depending on what you hope to achieve, you’ve got some options.

For those of us who garden, compost and composting is simply a work of rot—without the unseen work of fungi, bacteria, protozoa, insects and earthworms feeding upon the dead, our living world would be continually engulfed in its rapidly expanding past. Imagine a present-day world awash in a hundred million years’ worth of undigested dinosaur carcasses, and you will understand the significance of the decomposers